surveillance

This past August, the (at the time) latest Snowden leak revealed a secret hacking collective at the NSA called Tailored Access Operations, more commonly referred to as TAO. More information surfaced about the unit is subsequent leaks, the latest of which includes a couple pictures of the TAO bugging intercepted network hardware.

If you’ll remember back to October of 2012, there was a bit of a hubbub about Huawei and ZTE making electronics for the United States. It was said that these China-based companies "could undermine US national security" according to the US-based House Intelligence Committee. After admitting they’d actually found no evidence of wrongdoing, it would appear that the very means for spying described by the House Intelligence Committee were used by the NSA abroad.

For those of you not satisfied with being able to toss a ball into the sky to capture a sphere of photos, there’s now mortar rounds. Fired from 40-millimeter-capable firearm, these beasts are capable of being shot into the air where they deploy a camera with a parachute. This camera then captures images as it falls gracefully toward the ground.

You might think the U.S. is nearing a saturation point with cameras, but you'd be wrong. We've got a long ways to go before we can safely consider ourselves to be stuffed to the gills with cameras like Sentinels breaching Zion.

In a ruling on federal phone-tracking this week a U.S. District Judge based in New York has ruled that the NSA’s actions thus far have been legal. Judge William Pauley sent a ruling on Friday, the 27th of December, saying the NSA program “represents the government’s counter-punch” in efforts to eliminate al-Qaida network efforts. This ruling dismisses a lawsuit brought on by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Edward Snowden has recorded this year's "Alternative Christmas Message" for Great Britain's Channel 4. The video is brief -- lasting just 1:43 -- with Snowden directly addressing "you and your family" about the state of mass surveillance and the reasons for why privacy matters now and in the future. We've transcribed the recording for your convenience below.

The United States Director of National Intelligence has publicly acknowledged -- for the first time -- the existence of National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance programs dating back to 2001. The admission comes by way of court documents filed in two separate cases involving the NSA. The documents were posted to the office's website this weekend.

The latest installment of the ongoing slow release of the whistleblower Edward Snowden's cache of 1.7 million stolen NSA documents has revealed over 1,000 targets of the NSA's and GCHQ's international spying efforts between 2008 and 2011. The targets include high-ranking officials in allied nations, economic regulatory bodies, humanitarian aid agencies, and -- seemingly as an afterthought -- individuals being watched for hypothesized ties to terrorism. These particular documents were reported Friday by the American newspaper New York Times, Britain's the Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel.

Modern life is recorded on a million (give or take) surveillance cameras, and those who live in particularly large metropolitan locations are often under the watchful eye of cameras mounted all over the place -- on buildings, street posts, inside stores. You're not likely to notice many of them, and some people don't like that idea. That's where a concept wearable called the surveillance spaulder comes in.

A new analysis of the Snowden papers by German magazine Der Spiegel shows GCHQ--the English counterpart to the US's NSA--served false copies of LinkedIn and Slashdot pages to install malware on a few target individuals' computers. This latest revelation is not a mass spying program, but a server-heavy, speed-dependent initiative to spy on key individuals deemed to be assets by the GCHQ. Targets included employees of GRX providers Comfon, Mach (now owned by Syniverse), and nine members of OPEC, the global oil cartel.